Morrison Hotel
==============

"Morrison Hotel (MoHo) was started in 1986 as a way to learn Unix
and meet girls. It was a 10-line multi-user BBS offering Chat,
Message Boards, Email, Games, File Transfers, Voting, and much
more.
"The sysops were Mike Cantu and myself, both 19 year old (in 1986)
college students going to California State University Long Beach.
"Mike and I spent a number of years as interns administering a IBM
mainframe system used by students in our high school district. On
that system we wrote some of the predecessors of MoHo features (in
Fortran!). We also spent a lot of time online during high school
on different BBSes around the country and in Orange County.
"The software for the MoHo was developed from scratch by us in C,
running Unix System V/3 on a Convergent Technologies miniframe
(first) and then SCO Unix on a 386 tower. We had ten 2400 baud US
Robotics Sportsters.
"The users of the board were primarily college kids and teenagers.
It was a prime place to meet the opposite sex via Chat :) The
users got together for parties all the time.
"Because 10 phone lines weren't cheap (neither was the $10,000
Convergent Miniframe), we charged a $10/month flat rate
subscription (we also had a "credits" plan where you were charged
for online usage). Access to the message boards and email were
free, as was limited access to chat. We strongly believed that the
basic features of our bulletin board should always be free.
"The chat system we developed was heavily influenced by
Diversidial. Lots of cool and unique features (like Jive mode, if
you remember the old Unix jive filter). A clone of the MoHo chat
system (same UI, different code base) was used by Vrave based at
hyperreal.org
"The message boards we developed were very heavily influenced by
PicoSpan (the original software that the Well ran). Featuring
threaded topics, etc.
"The email system and the menuing system we developed were heavily
influenced by Forum-PC (probably the best DOS PC BBS software
there was, followed by WWIV)
"Among the many games (there were lots of freeware games for Unix)
was a game we wrote called TAC - Tactical Armored Command. This
was a real-time, multiuser tank battle game. People spent hours
and hours playing that game!
"File transfers used gz, a freeware Unix file transfer program
that supported x/y/zmodem.
"We did not advertise because the phone lines were always busy
(tho we had a 30 minute timeout after which you were hung up on to
let someone else get a chance to get in). We had numerous phone
numbers, so that MoHo would be local dialing to the widest area.
"A company called US CAD hired us, and adopted Morrison Hotel to
try to turn it into a profitable business (both from subscriptions
and from developing the software to sell to other sysops). The
business never panned out though, for a number of reasons. We were
eventually laid off from US CAD in 1989 and Morrison Hotel was
shut down. We did not have the motivation to start it back up
again.
"That is the story of Morrison Hotel." - Eric Pederson

Phone   : 714-531-5609
Place   : Orange County, CA
Years   : 1986 - 1989
Sysop   : Eric Pederson, Mike Cantu
Software: Skynet

Listed by telephone number, as they all were. A few of
these boards did reach the web: see recoveries-002.txt.
Source  : bbslist.textfiles.com, compiled by Jason Scott

------------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://hp84.com/    |    https://ge97.com/
.